Last week, I picked up a $350 machine from Staples that has revolutionized my home and office. It’s an incredibly productive tool. I’m using it to digitize 3 decades of paper records onto a portable hard drive that fits in my pocket. The machine is the Xerox DocuMate 510. It’s a high-speed scanner. You can load up to 50 documents at once. Click a button, and the scanner reads 20 pages per minute. Wow! The scanner includes software that converts paper documents into popular formats such as PDF and Word. Based on my own usage patterns, I can fit 146,000 scanned pages onto a single drive. That’s equivalent to a roomfull of filing cabinets. But the benefits of converting to paperless go way beyond the creation of space. Imagine your fate if a fire, flood, vandal, or hurricane were to destroy your records. However, once you’ve digitized, you can duplicate all your records onto a 2nd portable drive within minutes. The new USB drives are small enough to fit into a safe-deposit box. Retrieval is also much easier once you’ve gone digital. Instead of paper folders, you can create folders and subfolders on your hard drive to organize your records according to your preferences. For example, I created a folder titled “Real Estate Transactions”. I then created a subfolder for each transaction using the property’s address (such as “123 Easy St”). You can do the same for “medical records”, “IRS records”, “receipts”, “warranties”, etc. With paper records, you have to remember the physical location where you filed each document. But if you have named your scanned PDF files and folders to reflect the content, you can use the search feature of Windows Explorer to locate any document within seconds. For example, if I am looking for my State Farm insurance policy, I right-click on the drive where I keep my records, click on “search”, and tell Windows to show all files that include “State Farm” in the title. The results are displayed almost instantaneously. The policy is just a doubleclick away. I can read it, print it, or even e-mail it. It is likely you will find lots of new applications for this scanner. Instead of faxing documents, scan and e-mail them. There’s no loss of quality. You can also scan any form and fill it out on your computer. Optical Character Readers convert documents to text. And don’t forget to scan receipts and warranties so you can instantly retrieve them when those lifetime light bulbs fail in 10 years. And if you want to digitize yourself, forget it. That requires a DNA scanner. I’ll e-mail myself to you when that happens. That’ll be a ride.
